Intention

Nita Farahany’s main intention with her TED talk “When technology can read minds, how will we protect our privacy?” is to convince her audience of the need for a right to cognitive liberty.

However, before she can realize her main intention, she first needs to achieve two related intentions that her final arguments can build upon - first she needs to convince the audience that EEG technology will become capable of reading minds, and then she has to make the case that such a technology is likely to be misused. 

Convince the audience that mind-reading will become possible

Since many people would probably regard the idea of mind-reading as science fiction, Farahany’s first priority is to convince her audience that the idea of mind-reading is not as unrealistic as they might believe, and further that it might become reality sooner than most people think (l. 11).

To realize this first intention, Farahany builds ethos to present herself as a trustworthy and knowledgeable source of information on the topic. She then presents some logical arguments as to why we ought to regard the idea of mind-reading as realistic, using specif...